book, An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930, Stewart Emory Tolnay explains that the "lynching era encompasses roughly the five decades between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Great Depression."

"During these years we may estimate that there were 2,018 separate incidents of lynching in which at least 2,462 African-American men, women and children met their deaths in the grasp of southern mobs, comprised mostly of whites," Tolnay writes. "Although lynchings and mob killings occurred before 1880, notably during early Reconstruction when blacks were enfranchised, radical racism and mob violence peaked during the 1890s in a surge of terrorism that did not dissipate until well into the twentieth century."